“It has been cold, so cold to-day.  I left Elsie asleep, and went to the office of the ——­ Magazine with an article I wrote a month or so ago.  The truth is, Elsie should have a doctor, and I have no money to pay him.  I was almost sure Mr. ——­ would take this.  He was out, and I waited a long time in vain, and finally walked back in the wind and blowing dust, chilled to the heart.  I wished to write in the afternoon, but I was so beaten with the weather that I threw myself on the bed by Elsie to try to collect my thoughts.  It was no use.  I found my eyes and mind wandering vaguely about the room.  I was staring at the paper frieze of garlanded roses, and the ugly, dingy paper below it of a hideous lilac.  What fiend ever suggested to my landlady the combination of crimson roses and purplish paper?  How I hate my environments!  Poverty and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of the senses.  How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and the vales of Persia and the scented glades of the tropics were mine to wander through.  Yes, a dreamer’s Paradise, for I was only sixteen then, and untroubled by any thoughts of Love; yet sometimes Its shadow would enter and vaguely perplex me, a strange shape, waiting always beyond, in the midst of my glowing gardens, and I sighed with a prescient pain.  How have I known Love since those days?  As yet it has brought me but two things—­Sorrow and Expectation.  In that fragmentary love-time that was mine, I well remember one evening after he left me, that I threw myself on the floor, and kissing the place where his dear foot had been set, I prayed, still prostrate, the prayer I have so often prayed since.  I begged of God to let me barter for seven perfect days of love, all the years that He had, perhaps, allotted to me.  But my hot lips plead in vain against the dusty floor, and it was to be that instead; he was to leave me while love was still incomplete.  But I know we shall meet again, and I wait.  He loved me, and does not that make waiting easy?

“My book must, it shall succeed.  It shall wipe out the stain on my birth, it shall be enough to the world that I am what I am.  To-night I shall write half the night.  No, there is Elsie.  To-morrow, then, all day.  I shall not move from the desk.  Oh!  I have pierced my heart, to write with its blood.  It is an ink that ought to survive through the centuries.  Yet if it achieve my purpose for me, I care not if it is forgotten in ten years.

“February 12, 18—.

“I have seen him to-day, the only man I have ever loved.  He loves me no more.  It is ended.  What did I say?  I do not remember.  I knew it all, the moment he entered the room.  When he went, I said:  ’We shall never meet again, I think.  Kiss me on the lips once, as in the old days.’